Lords of the Starship

The spaceship Victory was to be seven miles long, a third of a mile in diameter, and have a wingspread of three and a half miles. It would have been a daunting undertaking even for the high-tech civilization that had collapsed centuries ago, but the heroic project had caught the imagination of a decadent nation, becoming an almost religious obsession. But who were the shadowy figures behind the project, and what was the real goal of the herculean project?